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Kurt Waldheim dies at 88; ex-UN chief hid Nazi past

Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes was exposed late in his career, died Thursday in Vienna, Austrian media reported. He was 88. He died of heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.

Although it was never proved that Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence, attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. Waldheim lied about his wartime service in the Balkans, maintaining that his military career ended in 1942 after he was wounded in a battle on the Russian front.

But more than four decades later, his assertions were disputed by witnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.

Kurt Waldheim was born on Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrä-Wördern, a village near Vienna. His father, Walter, the son of an impoverished blacksmith, became the local school superintendent and married a daughter of the mayor.

In his 1985 memoir, "In the Eye of the Storm," Kurt Waldheim described Austria in the aftermath of World War I as "the defeated, ruined, truncated remnant of the former Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire."

But thanks to his parents' middle-class standing, he and his brother and sister suffered few of the economic deprivations that most Austrians endured during the 1920s.

In March 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered his army into Austria and annexed the country. Because of his known anti-Nazi sympathies, Walter Waldheim was twice arrested by the Gestapo and lost his job.

"Our family was under constant surveillance," Waldheim wrote. "We lived in daily apprehension."

When defending himself against assertions that he had links to the Nazis, Waldheim always asserted that he never had belonged to a Nazi-affiliated group. But, in fact, at the age of 19 he joined the National Socialist German Students League - a Nazi youth organization - just a month after the Anschluss. Then in November 1938, he enrolled in the SA, the paramilitary Nazi organization of storm troopers.

Robert Edwin Herzstein, a historian and professor at the University of South Carolina, played a crucial role in uncovering Waldheim's Nazi past through archival research.

"Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime," Herzstein wrote. "But this nonguilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes."

Waldheim may have been able to hide his past for so long because of the web of intrigue between intelligence services in the Cold War era. By early 1948, the UN War Crimes Commission listed him as a suspected war criminal subject to trial. Yet no government pressed to bring Waldheim to account or even to reveal his unsavory history.

Instead Waldheim, a hardworking and talented diplomat, was allowed to rise to the pinnacle of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, and then go on to serve two terms as secretary general, from 1972 to 1982.

It was a period when the world body was increasingly dominated by third world rhetoric and paralyzed by disagreements between the superpowers. As secretary general, Waldheim was often criticized - by governments in the West, East and the third world - as ineffectual and overly cautious in his attempts to find solutions to the many conflicts erupting around the globe.

It was not until Waldheim left the United Nations and then ran for president of Austria in 1986 that his wartime past became widely known. During his presidential campaign, the efforts of his political opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish Congress uncovered archival evidence of Waldheim's involvement with the Nazi movement as a student and his wartime role in the Balkans.

But the disclosures sparked a nationalist backlash in Austria that aided Waldheim's election as president.

Many Austrians apparently viewed Waldheim's life as a parable of their own. They identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service.

In the years between the discovery of his scandalous past and his death, Waldheim steadfastly portrayed himself as an ordinary, unheroic citizen caught up in a maelstrom, a point Herzstein reflected upon.

"Waldheim was clearly not a psychopath like Dr. Josef Mengele nor a hate-filled racist like Adolf Hitler," Herzstein wrote. "His very ordinariness, in fact, may be the most important thing about him. For if history teaches us anything, it is that the Hitlers and the Mengeles could never have accomplished their atrocious deeds by themselves. It took hundreds of thousands of ordinary men - well-meaning but ambitious men like Kurt Waldheim - to make the Third Reich possible."